Pierre Mendès-France

French politician and diplomat

• Born: January 11, 1907
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 18, 1982
• Place of death: Paris, France

Mendès-France was a left-leaning French politician of the Radical Party who is best remembered for negotiating an armistice with the Viet Minh in 1954, which ended the French Indochina War, and for opening the negotiations that led to Tunisian independence. More generally, he acted as the conscience of the democratic non-communist Left in France during the Fourth and early Fifth republics.

Early Life

Born into an assimilated Jewish family, Pierre Mendès-France (mehn-dehs frahns) received a secular republican education at the Lycée Turgot and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, followed by studies at the Faculty of Law and the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. In 1924, he helped found the Ligue d’Action Universitaire Républicaine et Socialistes (LAURS), an antifascist student organization.

The early renown of Mendès-France was a result of his expertise in economics and finance. His thesis for the doctor of law degree, submitted in 1928, was entitled “La Politique financière du gouvernement Poincaré.” A 1929 article, “Les Finances de l’état démocratique,” and a 1930 book, La Banque internationale, focused on the central role of economics in the modern world and argued that the effective solution to practical difficulties required international solutions and, therefore, international organizations. These early publications, boldly critical of individualist law, were very well received and made Mendès-France a well-known figure, though in 1930 he was only twenty-three years old.

Life’s Work

The active political career of Mendès-France lasted for forty years. In 1932, he was elected deputy for the city of Louviers (Eure département); at twenty-five, he was the youngest deputy in the National Assembly. Though a member of a Radical Party, he was considered a “Young Turk,” along with Jacques Kayser, Pierre Cot, Gaston Bergery, Jean Zay, and Gaston Mannerville. In May, 1935, he was elected mayor of Louviers, a position he held, except for the interruption of World War II, until 1958. He devoted himself to financial and economic matters: In the National Assembly, he spoke in favor of government loans to farmers and was a member, then chair, of the Customs Committee; as a lawyer, he defended peasants; as mayor in Louviers, he oversaw the installation of public utilities and the provision of social welfare.

A strong proponent of the Popular Front strategy, Mendès-France was reelected to the National Assembly in 1936. He was critical of the delayed devaluation of the franc by the Léon Blum government, favoring instead immediate devaluation, and he opposed the policy of nonintervention in the Spanish Civil War. He nevertheless remained a vocal supporter of the government’s record of reform, and in 1938 entered Blum’s second government as undersecretary of the treasury. With Georges Boris, he authored the first French planning program, but in less than a month, and before implementation could proceed, the government fell.

With the outbreak of World War II, Mendès-France joined the air force. He was first assigned to the Levant but was on leave in Paris when the invasion of France began. He traveled to Louviers (he was still the elected mayor), witnessed the flight of French refugees fleeing the German army, and himself returned to Paris after receiving a shrapnel wound in the shoulder on June 9. He traveled southward as the Germans advanced and gained passage to Casablanca on the ship Massilia.

This “flight” became one portion of the charge of desertion trumped up by the Vichy government. Arrested on August 31, 1940, Mendès-France was transferred to Clermont-Ferrand where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to six years in prison. After a failed appeal, Mendès-France escaped from prison (on June 21, 1941). He lived underground for several months, mostly in Grenoble, and then escaped, via Geneva and Lisbon, to London on March 1, 1942, to join Charles de Gaulle and the Free French. Between October, 1942, and November, 1943, he rejoined his squadron at Hartfordbridge, England, and flew about a dozen bombing operations.

In November, 1943, Mendès-France moved to Algiers and became the Commissioner of Finance in the French National Liberation Committee (CFLN). In this capacity, he prepared for reconstruction and represented Free France at the international meeting at Bretton Woods (June, 1944) that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Following liberation, he was appointed minister of national economy in de Gaulle’s first government. He urged a policy of austerity, including the reduction of the volume of inflated currency in circulation; the restriction of consumption; wage and price controls; the freezing of bank accounts; a tax on capital gains; and state-imposed discipline on some production and exchange. De Gaulle rejected his advice in favor of the more laissez-faire policy advocated by minister of finance René Pleven, and as a result Mendès-France resigned in April, 1945.

Mendès-France returned to his duties as mayor of Louviers and was elected deputy, first to the Constituent Assembly in 1946, and then to the National Assembly in 1951. His various roles in formulating economic policy were arguably even more important: He taught courses at the École Nationale d’Administration on the fiscal and budgetary problems posed by planning and reconstruction, was a member of the Executive Committee of the IMF and World Bank, and became France’s representative, from 1947 to 1951, to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

The issue that catapulted Mendès-France to the center of French politics was not economic policy, however, but colonial policy. After 1950, he became a vocal public advocate of a negotiated settlement in Indochina that would entail the gradual evacuation of French troops and called for free elections and national independence for Vietnam. This campaign, coupled with his calls for dialogue with North Africa and his program for fiscal and economic reform, made Mendès-France the statesman of choice for many young technocrats and intellectuals.

His brief tenure as premier began on June 18, 1954, in the middle of the debacle of Dien Bien Phu. Mendès-France moved quickly to open direct negotiations with the Viet Minh in Geneva, and he succeeded in arranging the armistice that halted the fighting. Simultaneously, he traveled to Carthage to set in motion the negotiations that led to the internal autonomy of Tunisia . Finally, Mendès-France oversaw, after the French rejection of the European Defense Community, the London Agreements that led to German rearmament and English attachment to continental security. While Mendès-France was occupied with foreign policy issues, economic policy was left in the hands of the more moderate Edgar Faure, and by the time Mendès-France himself took over control of the Finance Ministry, on January 20, 1955, opponents were preparing to bring down the government.

The government fell on February 2, 1955, during a debate on the Maghreb. Many analysts believe that the underlying cause was too much success: Mendès-France had succeeded in the politically delicate tasks for which he had been given political power of extricating France from Vietnam and establishing a Western European union. Once achieved, Mendès-France was viewed as expendable by more traditional politicians of the Fourth Republic.

Mendès-France turned his attention to a consolidation of power for his progressive faction within the Radical Party. He was instrumental in forming the Republican Front, which brought together the parties of the noncommunist Left. The coalition won the elections of December, 1956, and Mendès-France served briefly as minister without portfolio in the government of Guy Mollet. He resigned in May, 1957, because of his opposition to the hard-line Algerian policy of the Socialist Party leader. Mendès-France became spokesperson for the democratic opposition on the Left: He was critical of government policy in North Africa; he almost alone warned against the consequences of the Suez adventure; he voted against the Treaty of Rome establishing the Common Market; and he opposed de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958. He was so out of step with national opinion that he lost the support of his constituency in Louviers in the elections of November, 1958. The following year, Mendès-France, now fifty-two years old, broke with the Radical Party, declared himself a socialist, and adhered to a splinter party of the Socialist Party that was attempting to distance itself from the policies of Mollet.

His brief return to the center of national politics occurred in 1967-1969. In March, 1967, he was elected deputy for Grenoble. During the crisis of 1968, he sympathized with the striking workers and students, attended the demonstration in Charléty, and even suggested (during de Gaulle’s dramatic disappearance) that he might lead a provisional government. In the Gaullist landslide that followed, he lost his assembly seat (by 132 votes). In 1969, he and Gaston Defferre ran a campaign against Georges Pompidou and the Gaullist system. They were badly beaten, and for all practical purposes Mendès-France passed from active political life. He died on October 18, 1982.

Significance

Pierre Mendès-France was probably the most influential figure in postwar French political life after Charles de Gaulle, despite the fact that he headed a government for only 245 days. His early renown came in the field for which his academic work best prepared him economics. At the age of twenty-one, he published a refutation of Henri Poincaré’s stabilization program, which made him famous. At thirty-one, he coauthored the first French planning program with a member of Blum’s Popular Front cabinet. At thirty-seven, he was the interlocutor of John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods. At thirty-eight, he called on de Gaulle to stabilize the economy in liberated France. Known for his rigor and his scrupulous attention to economic facts, he was the hardheaded conscience of a French Left which, too often in Mendès-France’s opinion, allowed flights of utopian fancy to obscure reality.

The event for which Mendès-France will be best remembered is the ending of French involvement in Indochina during his premiership between June, 1954, and February, 1955. Perhaps no European colonial power has withdrawn from its colonial possessions with greater human costs. It was Mendès-France who began the painful process of extricating France from its colonial past. Not only did he end the French war in Vietnam but also he began the negotiations in relatively friendly circumstances that led to the independence of Morocco and Tunisia.

For many in France, Mendès-France restored hope that reason and politics did not necessarily exclude each other; he represented a politics that was neither useless nor corrupt. In the words of François Mitterrand, “Pierre Mendès-France awakened our consciences.”

Bibliography

Lacouture, Jean. Pierre Mendès France. Translated by George Holoch. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984. This political biography is the best available book on Mendès-France. It describes with a sure hand the French political world to which Mendès-France not only reacted but also helped shape.

Mendès-France, Pierre, and Gabriel Ardant. Economics and Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. The essential book on Mendès-France’s economic thought.

Rioux, Jean-Pierre. The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958. Translated by Godfrey Rogers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. The history of the French Fourth Republic, written by a French expert.

Werth, Alexander. The Strange History of Mendès-France and the Great Conflict Over French North Africa. London: Barrie Books, 1957. Published during the final crisis of the French Fourth Republic, this book provides a sense of the drama of this period by a close observer. The greatest part of the book deals, as the title indicates, with the crisis of the French North African Empire.

Williams, Philip M. Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic. London: Longmans, 1964. A standard history of the Fourth Republic by a British expert.